Share this article
Cardano Gets 'Valentine' Upgrade: Here’s How it Benefits ADA Token
The ‘Valentine’ upgrade was pushed live on the mainnet in early Asian hours on Wednesday. Native ADA tokens outperformed crypto majors.
Updated Feb 15, 2023, 5:47 p.m. Published Feb 15, 2023, 7:49 a.m.
An upgrade to improve security and interoperability features on the Cardano blockchain was pushed live in early Asian morning hours on Wednesday.
Dubbed “Valentine,” the upgrade will make enhancements to cross-chain functionality for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications building on the network. It was proposed earlier in February and voted favorably by network validators, as CoinDesk reported.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Happy St. Valentine’s day. 💙
— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) February 14, 2023
We are pleased to report that the #Valentine upgrade – support for #Plutus SECP cryptographic primitives – is now live on the #Cardano mainnet.
1/4 pic.twitter.com/SdYWknKeHY
The upgrade is said to bring enhanced cryptographic features to Cardano while improving cross-chain decentralized application (dapp) development on Plutus – the smart contract platform of the Cardano blockchain.
“Interoperability is key for blockchain growth. As more dapps are built on Cardano, it is essential that they are not siloed to just one ecosystem, enabling users to interact with different blockchains and access a wider range of services,” a Cardano developer and code maintainer said in a tweet.
Cross-chain bridges are software applications that enable transactions to occur between various blockchains.
Such a feature on Cardano would allow developers to build applications that connect Cardano with other blockchains, which would in turn give users access to other blockchains to interact easily with financial services offered by Cardano dapps.
Dapps rely on smart contracts instead of middlemen to offer financial services, such as lending and borrowing, to users, who often use that dapp’s token or are rewarded in those tokens.
This, in turn, would likely improve the utility of Cardano’s native ADA token. As such, Wednesday’s upgrade preceded buying pressure on the token, with the price up 8% in the past 24 hours, outperforming bitcoin and ether.
The locked value of tokens on Cardano-based dapps has increased over 100% since the start of January to over $110 million, suggesting demand.
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Solana’s Drift Launches v3, With 10x Faster Trades
With v3, the team says that about 85% of market orders will fill in under half a second, and liquidity will deepen enough to bring slippage on larger trades down to around 0.02%.
What to know:
- Drift, one of the largest perpetuals trading platforms on Solana, has launched Drift v3, a major upgrade meant to make on-chain trading feel as fast and smooth as using a centralized exchange.
- The new version will deliver 10-times faster trade execution thanks to a rebuilt backend, marking the largest performance jump the project has made so far.
Top Stories
